


Looting, Looted, Lost

by Elizabeth Tudor (Liz_Tudor)



Category: Lupin III
Genre: Friendship, M/M, What am I worth to you, collecting, relationships, treasures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-07-18 18:01:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16123826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liz_Tudor/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Tudor
Summary: Every now and then, the question crops up. When you hang around with the world's master thief, it's inevitable, really."What's the best heist you've ever pulled off?""What's the best thing you've ever stolen?"It's months after he starts working with the thief that Jigen realizes treasures and art aren't Lupin's favorite things to steal. People are.





	Looting, Looted, Lost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [QuillHeart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuillHeart/gifts).



"Remember: fear is just consciousness, plus life. Regret is an attempt to avoid what has already happened. Toast is bread, held under direct heat until crisp. The present tense of regret is indecision. The future tense of fear is either comedy or tragedy. And the past tense of toast is toasted."

~Welcome to Night Vale

 

*********************************************************

 

Every now and then, the question crops up. When you hang around with the world's master thief, it's inevitable, really.

 

"What's the best heist you've ever pulled off?"

 

"What's the best thing you've ever stolen?"

 

The first time it happens within Jigen's earshot, he's chained at the wrists, sitting uncomfortably in a dingy little police station waiting for Zenigata to book them or Goemon to slice the door off its hinges, whichever comes first. The local police are mostly quiet curiosity, making idle conversation with the celebrity thieves while Zenigata shouts into his phone, trying to get Interpol to set aside the kilometers of red tape and actually get shit done. Jigen stops to think about the question, but Lupin grins hugely, doesn't so much as pause for breath.

 

"Oh that's easy! It was in a pyramid, rigged up with traps, and I was after this gemstone peacock..."

 

He knows this one, Jigen realizes halfway through Lupin's explanation of setting traps to deter other thieves while dodging the ancient deadfalls and scorpion pits himself. He knows this one, and it's not a good memory, not anywhere close to it. He'd been jobless and traveling to try and ignore the fact that he was now homeless on top of it, had just had his bag with the last of his cash stolen, had run into Fujiko for the second time when he sincerely hoped the first would never be repeated, had barely made it out of that fucking pyramid alive.

 

"You're calling _that_ the best heist?" Jigen interrupts his partner halfway through a description of the secret passages. "That was a nightmare! We almost died, Fujiko was a bitch, and we didn't even get anything out of it!"

 

"Of course we did!" Lupin exclaims, ignoring the bemused cops to stare at him. "That was the heist I got you!"

 

Jigen freezes.

 

"I mean, it'd be a few more jobs before it became a regular thing," Lupin continues blissfully, "but that was the start of it. Best loot I've ever walked off with," he grins, openly enjoying Jigen's shock. "An original work of art, absolutely one of a kind!"

 

They're gone only a few minutes later, the police station filling with smoke and their handcuffs sliced to tin foil, but the conversation sticks with Jigen, sets a pattern that he'll see repeated over and over. Asked about his favorite escapades or his greatest moments of triumph, Lupin will describe the pyramid, or barely avoiding being executed in the process of meeting Fujiko, or his house, car, and all the cash from the latest job going up in flames via his introduction to Goemon.

 

Despite being a renowned thief, Lupin doesn't really have a use for _stuff_ , Jigen is realizing more and more. His grandfather's Paris mansion is crammed with jewels and treasures and works of art accumulated across three generations of master thieves, and Lupin has very little interest in any of it, will happily give that legendary sapphire that's been sitting in the candy dish or the Botticelli hung slightly askew on the landing to any of his friends who ask him for it. He likes the challenge of parting the paranoid and over-wealthy from their carefully hoarded treasures, but the stuff itself is given away or left to gather dust or sold to pay for gadgets and dinners out and replacement parts to fix the car after it's been totaled yet again.

 

No, Lupin doesn't collect stuff, Jigen has come to recognize. He collects people. And why not? People are unique, perishable, require care and attention to get and to keep. They are far more difficult to steal effectively; they have to want to be stolen, an irresistible challenge to someone who can't turn down the impossible. And when he already has a beautiful and dangerous spy, a trophy anyone would consider worthwhile, what better people to round off his collection with than the greatest gunman and swordsman alive?

 

Jigen thinks about that a long time, whether he can live with being relegated to some treasured possession, part of Lupin's collection. Just another successfully looted prize, just another person who wants him as a trophy. _Look how tough I am! Look how scary my bodyguard is! And he does whatever I say. I can afford the very best._ He's taken those jobs before, but there's never any satisfaction in them, and he'd hoped that this...might be something else.

 

Months and heists and adventures later, he decides that he can live with it. Goemon and Fujiko decided to stay in Japan for a bit, so he and Lupin had headed back to Europe alone, wound up in the old house in Paris, wound up in bed together. It's not the first time. That's another thing for Jigen to wonder about and berate himself over, late at night, that he's sleeping with his boss when he's not even sure he really wants to stick around. That he's sleeping with his boss at all, when he's supposed to be the consummate professional.

 

This time, after arousal-clumsy fingers had fumbled off layers of clothing, after kisses pressed into collarbones and along shoulders with increasing urgency, after the delicious press and pressure of penetration and fingers gripping hips hard enough to bruise and the desperate warmth of having someone skin-close and so gloriously _there_ , they are cuddled up together under a slightly musty velvet duvet, chest to chest while Lupin traces those long fingers over the many scars on his body, admiring and memorizing every inch of him. Reassuring himself that Jigen is a possession worth having, the gunman thinks sometimes when he's feeling uncharitable. This time, Lupin pauses when he gets to a new injury, a thick, scabbed-over gash at the ridge of his shoulder where a bullet had grazed him. Jigen had barely felt it, too caught up in the adrenaline of the job to notice the stinging blood until later.

 

"That was close," Lupin murmurs, fingers ghosting over the puckered scab. Jigen doesn't know what to say to that. Close calls are part and parcel in their line of work.

 

"Well, he didn't get me."

 

"I'd miss you too much."

 

"There are other gunmen, you could find another." None quite as good as him, but he's far from the only sure shot out there.

 

Lupin had scowled, swatted his other shoulder like a petulant child before crushing him into a hug, face hidden against his chest as though that could keep all the dark things of the world at bay, never mind that Jigen himself is one of the scariest things stalking the streets. Not for the first time, he thinks that Lupin must be some kind of crazy, if being this close to a killer for hire makes him feel safer than turning and running in the opposite direction. The thought is lost when Lupin shifts just a little closer, mumbles against his chest.

 

"I'd miss _you_."

 

And, well, that was his answer, wasn't it?

 

That was hours ago. Here, now, Lupin is draped over him like a blanket, snoring like a buzzsaw and drooling on his shoulder. It's not a comfortable position. Jigen has no intention of moving.

 

He can definitely live with it, he decides, hitching his arms just a little tighter around the sleeping thief. There are worse things than being someone's treasure. And besides - the thought makes him smile - Lupin is quite the connoisseur, and this is a very exclusive collection.

**Author's Note:**

> Written in one sitting following a conversation with QuillHeart about tattoos and the kinds of things that Lupin likes to steal. =)
> 
> The pyramid story about how Lupin and Jigen met is from Woman Called Fujiko Mine. While I have a lot of problems with the series, there are a lot of things I like about it too, and the idea that Lupin and Jigen met in a pyramid they were both trying to rob just straight up entertains me.


End file.
